This article is a review of BULLHEAD.

“Because no matter what you do or think, one thing is for sure, you’re always f*cked. Now, tomorrow, next week or next year,” Jacky Vanmarsenille Ripples of tragedy reverberate around a small community. BULLHEAD is a different kind of crime film. Anger bubbles under the skin of the principal, at a heinous crime committed on an innocent, but the perpetrator is not of sound mind. Psychotic even. But young. Who do you blame? Can/should anyone suffer the accumulated vitriol of a damaged life? Moral ambiguity abounds. An opaque leading man, and not in a bad way. Writer-director Michaël R. Roskam asks interesting questions of his protagonists, and audience, and offers no real answers. Is nihilism a satisfying rejoinder?

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Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts – RUST AND BONE) works on his family’s cattle farm in Limburg, Belgium. Withdrawn and introverted, but also powerfully built, and not backwards in dishing physical punishment. Although the local is the focus, and those he comes into contact, the story initially darts around the country (Zeebrugge, Waremme, etc.). There is a criminal conspiracy, which has taken a more urgent turn, as a policeman, closing in, is murdered. Jacky’s farm is on the periphery of these very shady dealings, relatively. His father before him, and now Jacky inherits the trade in corrupt meat practices – illegally injecting hormones into their livestock. The filmmakers don’t condemn or glorify, just depict. It is your take on European farming that you bring to this. Mirroring - Jacky also injects, testosterone. It isn’t until a narrative jump back 20 years that the audience understands why. Unexpected, shocking, disturbing. Back in the present, we have a complicated man, distracted by inner turmoil, and simultaneously having to tackle as best he can a malfeasant situation he doesn’t have full appreciation of. Is there anyone Jacky can turn to? Unique grief has isolated him. Dialogue is stripped back to the essentials. Scenes build to a crescendo that may have inevitability (with hindsight), but also doesn’t quite feel satiating. One has to ask if writer-director Roskam views the world as heading in a downward spiral. The atmosphere as the credits roll is of a society quietly rotten. The only thing breaking the despair is a perpetual sinking-stomach feeling of imminent violence. Powerful and upsetting, BULLHEAD almost gets everything right; but it’s a compelling story difficult to know how to conclude sans being trite or simple. You decide.

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